Naquada

Some time ago a group of magicians decided to put together a deck of cards, not just any deck of cards, but a deck of cards that was to be signed by the stars of the magic world, a bit like a who’s who of the magic world, on the back of a set of playing cards.

They didn’t just do this for something to pass the time, the deck was put together to be auctioned on eBay on the 11th July, with all the proceeds going to the Make-A-Wish foundation, who grant magical wishes to children and young people fighting life-threatening illnesses.

So the guy went magic lectures and started to collect signatures on the deck, the response was unbelievable, their magical heroes were jumping at the chance to help out, and the signatures started to grow.

James Randi helped out by immediately offering to contacting some of the biggest (and most elusive) names in Magic today, even though his own charity The James Randi Educational Foundation keeps him busy.

Rich Ferguson spent many hours on e-mails and supporting the guys. Rich’s contacts and the information swelling the signatures even more.

The deck just reads like the greatest collection any autograph hunter, magical or otherwise, each signature on the back of a Red Backed Bicycle Card, even with some in jokes or references to the cards signed.

Penn and Teller signed their 3 of Clubs, Simon Lovell the 5 of Clubs, The Pendragons, Roger Crosthwaite, Stephen Mulhern, Ali Bongo, Wayne Dobson, Jeffrey Durham, Joe Pasquale, Banachek, Ian Rowland, Eugene Burger, Max Maven, Lance Burton, and Mac King to name but a few.

So great was the response to sign cards, people started to sign additional cards, Michael Murray signed one of his ESP2 cards, Barry and Stuart a b&s card, Rich Ferguson threw in 4 DVD’s, Simon lovell signed his Off Broadway show poster, Ian Rowland’s 6 of spades card is one of his rare and valuable WOW cards. The card collection threw in a stainless steel card guard (plus normal deck of bicycles!) Paul Gordon threw in his diary trick (and signed it) and his unusual oil and water trick manuscript

In all Graeme Smith, Tony Youens, Paul Lewcock, Andy Brinkworth and Jack Skertchly have done a fantastic job of creating something that will raise lots (providing you bid!) for the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Visit their site and sign up for notifications as to when the auction starts, and more news on the ongoing process of the signatures and bonuses, or just contact them directly

Technorati Tags: autographs, Charity, ebay, james randi, Jeffrey Durham, Joe Pasquale, Lance Burton, Mac King, Magic, magicians, Make-a-wish, Max Maven, Penn and Teller, collectable, puppy, Simon Lovell, Wayne Dobson

Given the last few days thunderstorms, you’d be forgiven in thinking this was a celebration of the weather, but it’s not. The annual Reading Water Fest, takes place this weekend (saturday and sunday the 23rd and 24th of June 07 from 11am onwards) along Chestnut Walk, the Riverside Walk and up to the Bel and the Dragon restaurant in Reading.

The event, run by Reading Borough Council and the Kennet and Avon Canal Trust, is one of the town’s best-loved events, normally signaling that the internationally renowned Reading Festival and WOMAD are fast approaching, but obviously the council didn’t deem it important enough to grant or make the effort to give WOMAD more space, so it moved on..

The event winds its way through the abbey ruins, along Chestnut and Riverside Walks and ending up at Bel and the Dragon and the Riverside Museum. The event is a celebration of canal, and includes traditional music and dance in the Chapter House of the Abbey Ruins, as well as other entertainment throughout the Water Fest site throughout the day. Childrens activities and entertainment normally take place in the Abbey Ruins throughout the day,

Chestnut Walk is transformed into the Water Fest ‘craft avenue’ where you can browse among the hand-made products and take in the beautifully painted narrow boats along the towpath. later in the day there’s a boat parades along the river and a best-dressed boat competition, canoeing demonstrations, a duck race and a boat tug of war on the water too.

Proving it’s a nice day, its a great (and free!) day out in an area of Reading most people don’t see and some don’t even know exist!!

Technorati Tags: avon, belanddragon, berkshire, canal, freedaysout, kennet, narrowboats, publicevents, waterfest, reading, readingabbey

Saturday July 7th is the London Mentalism Meeting in london (obviously!). I’ve done magic for years, purely as a hobby rather than paid performances, and over the last few years I’ve become more interested in the Mentalism side, to be honest I’m not 100% sure why, I think it’s basically just appealing to my people side more than the previous magic I’ve done.

To be honest, you can’t not want to attend an event with a poster as interesting as this one. It just reminds me of the old Victorian theatre posts. The poster is by Phill Smith of Mitox fame.

The meeting is organised by Dr Todd Landman, and is being held at Tredwell’s Bookshop, not far from Covent Garden, Tredwells carries a heady mixture of genres: poetry anthologies; fortune-telling guides; classic novels; grimoires (or Grymoire I never know how you actually spell it), art books, folklore studies; occult texts; etiquette manuals; literary essays; almanacs; paranormal study journals; travel writing; philosophical works; antique dictionaries; tarot cards; and biographies.

Tredwells is also awash with old engravings, carved wall-plaques, wall hangings, loose incenses, hand-made soaps, ceremonial daggers (including witches’ athames), wooden wands, antique candle-sticks, rock crystals and ethnic jewellery. So it’s the prefect setting for the meeting..

Tredwells is a step back in time: the building itself was constructed in 1710, and is listed. The interior is almost entirely original, right down to the archway sculpted with dancing fauns. The original hardwood floors are scattered with persian rugs and mismatched antique bookcases line the original plaster walls. Pride of place is given to the legendary “Browsers’ Sofa” on which customers have spent a blissful hour.

The meeting is going to be informal and the attendees have been invited to perform on a voluntary basis for comments and feedback (I think I’ll just be joining in the discussions rather than performing myself!). There’s going to be small group workshops on effects, tools of the trade, and tips on the business side of things. Todd is also hoping to get some output from the meeting (possibly a book or some notes) given the vast range of people going; authors, thinkers, photographers and the like..

I’m really looking forward to this now I’ve taken the plunge…

Technorati Tags: london, Magic, mentalism

I was looking at the merits of moving to MovableType Version 4 the other day, and Andy pointed out the fact that WordPress already had many of the features of MT4.

This prompted me to look at what WordPress had to offer, and I have to say the whole admin side of WP2.2 is great. I particularly liked the Widgets and the drag and drop configuration. not to mention to seamlessly simple installation (and yes it did take about five minutes like it says!).

The import from MovableType was also pretty straight forward, although I’ve lost the post ID’s which means alot of the linked in sites wont see the correct posts anymore (they will get redirected to the homepage or in some of the more popular links, get redirected to the correct post via .htaccess rewrites)

WP also seems a lot quicker than MT, even with a large number of pings to sites, and posting seems much much quicker, the theme side is simpler than MT’s and actually appears to work!!

So you’ll see I’ve now converted over the a full WordPress site hosted on my servers, you’ll have to keep with me on any small hiccups and missing links, it might be a good idea of update any feeds (although I think I’ve correctly coded the rewrite mods in .htaccess to ensure you dont have to update your feeds).

Some of the other features of my old site need adding in (like the Plazes map, lastFM and Google AdSense), but basically it should be working.. (well if you see this post… it’s obviously up and running!!)

have fun and keep reading!!!

Technorati Tags: movabletype, wordpress

Before I start, I should warn you there are some spoilers in this post, so.. if you’re lucky enough to have tickets to the remaining sell out shows.. go away.. come back after the 17th June when the show’s run is over.. You’ll just enjoy it more…

I’ve seen all the previous shows Derren has done, and it’s a shame this show doesn’t have a West End run, we can only hope that Derren changes his mind and decides to rerun in London, as the show is well worthy of a London airing.

But.. the show.. there wasn’t a run in Reading this year (possibly to do with the Reading massive screwing up a few of his tricks last year!!) so we decided on the Oxford venue, which it has to be said was a lovely venue, quite small and fairly intimate. We had 5th row seats, dead center. I think one of the nice things about Derren Brown shows is that the tickets are very reasonably priced (unless you pay the £200 odd on ebay!!) and the programs are a fair price at a fiver.. anyhow… on entering the theatre I instantly spotted a Malloy Master Prediction box hanging above the stage, that was quite exciting in itself, since I’ve been wondering how it worked (now I know!). The stage was set in the guise of a Victorian front parlour, think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, seances, mediumship and mystery, fitting the show very well

The first few minutes of the show is a nice introduction via a projection screen, working round the idea of focus, and not noticing things outside your normal area of vision something thats come back to a number of times in the show.. (I wont mention the gorilla!). It also introduces the box hanging from the top of the stage in full view.. This box… obviously is very important..

Derren starts the show with some wonderful effects, again his normal style of mind reading, as always executed without flaw (or.. where it is flawed, it’s flawed for a reason!!). these consisted of the game of Twenty Questions where he correctly ‘guessed’ at six audience members thought of objects, including one member from our group (a non magician) who was totally baffled as to how he did it, in fact Derren did the ‘just think of the answers and dont say them’ method on him, which confused him even more!! This section was really nicely put together, and showed a slight change from the previous shows in that Derren was predicting what we were thinking of, as opposed to influencing us at the time, so six spectators down on with more effects..

There was an excellent bank note serial prediction, the numbers obtained from a phonecall to a spectators son, which seemed to go wrong, ending up with the telephoned person having unknowingly predicted the banknote serial number.. class!!

I think theres a few things that stood out in my mind as excellent effects, the Question and Answer session at the end (a classic Victorian mental effect he described as ‘The Oracle Act’) was in my opinion perfection.. he executed it flawlessly (although some people say it was a little long taking up the entire second half) and I watched trying to track the various methods at work.. Derren in a nutshell asked audience members in the break to place questions in sealed envelopes into a glass bowl on stage, placing only their initials and row numbers on the outside.

He then picked envelopes, correctly guessing at things like names, or ages or sexes of the people that wrote the question. Once the person was found, they stood, and he started to answer their question, and in a lot of cases started to tell them more details about them, their lifes, illnesses and other personal or secret information that to all the audiences view, he wouldn’t know. I have to say this was probably one of the best executed Q&A’s I’ve seen.

Moving on from divining the questions in the envelopes, he started to pick up questions people were merely thought of, objects in pockets, personal items people were thinking about, and other seemingly impossible things. I can only imagine how amazing and gob smacking this must have been to non-magicians, this was also done blindfolded.

A nice part of this was a book divination, a girl from the audience held up a book, and thought of a page and a line form that book. Derren correctly recounted the paragraphs content, and even the books cover, this fooled me, and I’m still hunting for methods on it, again probably simple, but so expertly performed it covered it’s own tracks..

The show ended with the revelation of the box, containing a complete prediction of the outcome of a number of effects in the show, the thought of objects, the hobby of a spectators son who came on stage, and the description of the volunteer who came up at the end to open the box.

However you look at the show and the effects, there are two views… the views of the people around me that genuinely believe that Derren has ‘something‘ which means he can in some way read minds, or reactions, body language or predict things, and the magic view; that this is magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship, mainly showmanship, and flawless showmanship at that..

In either case, you cannot think anything else than.. bloody hell that’s clever..

I hung around the stage door in the hopes of getting my Pure Effect and Absolute Magic signed (thankfully the ones I brought when they were in print for Twenty odd pounds, and not the ones from eBay at up to £100 plus), however the queue was massive, and Michelle had a cold, so we headed back… Hopefully I’ll be able to catch him some other time and get them autographed..

Of course if you’ve read down to here.. and you’ve off to see the show, and you didn’t heed my warning of spoilers.. you’ll still enjoy the show, since I’ve not listed everything.. It was an excellent evening, and well worth the money..

I also forgot to say how much the poster (Illustrated by Kerry Donovan) reminded me of the Thurston and Ask Alexander posters from their careers;

Technorati Tags: DerrenBrown, magic, mentalism, shows

This is an interesting read;

If you just want the details and features and good stuff, there’s a free beta version to play with, and you’ll find out about all kinds of cool new features:

* A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing

* Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT

* Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system

* A completely redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before

* And it’s going to be available in a completely open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved movabletype.org.

We have three tools other than Movable Type here at Six Apart: TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn’t connect to. And now that they’re all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they’ve taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.

Movable Type 4 Shared Components We started TypePad four years ago, to get a lot of the power that MT users had experienced into the hands of people who didn’t want to install software, and it’s evolved into a tool for serious bloggers, as well as great option for small businesses and even big-name publishers to get the word out without the technical requirements.

When the LiveJournal team joined Six Apart, it was a crash course in community, one that’s been challenging at times, but has also been immensely rewarding as we start to see what helps people really connect with each other at a human level. And it doesn’t hurt that the LiveJournal team invented a lot of the technology that’s helped grow not just our communities, but all of Web 2.0.

The success of all those Web 2.0 communities is something that greatly influenced our efforts in Vox, where the community lessons of LiveJournal were combined with one of the messages that our Movable Type community taught us early on: Sometimes we just want to talk privately to our friends and family, even when we’re blogging. A lot of the biggest challenges in blogging have come from not being able to direct the right conversations to the right groups of people, and so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet that need.

It’s kinda hinting at an open source version of MT and aspects of WEB 2.0…

Technorati Tags: movabletype, beta, web2.0

I’ve been get more and more annoyed with the fact that the Mac G5’s been freezing almost randomly the last month or so, I’d repaired and rebuilt the disk, changed set up of hardware, just about everything I could think of. The symptoms were that the UI of OSX would freeze, this could be at anytime, the system clock (it’s always good to have the seconds in the system clock area to check if the machines running correctly) would freeze, but the mouse would continue to move unhindered on the screen. The only solution was a reboot, and recheck of the disk, and given it could then happen immediately again, it was getting a bit tiresome.

I’d even looked at replacing the G5 with an iMac, and selling this one off as spares or ‘need repair’ on ebay, but a thought struck me the other night.. This is all graphics related, maybe the graphic card was on its way out. I opened up the case and pulled out the ATI Radeon 9800, and to my horror looked at the fan. This thing was caked in dust, it’s surprising that the thing even turned to be honest!! a little run over with the handheld Dyson (compressed air would have been more sensible but I thought that given the amount of dust lodged in the fan, I might as well go for the industrial cleaning!) resulted in a nice clean and clear fan. I put the card back into the G5, booted and kept my fingers crossed.. I seems that this was the entire issue. Obviously the fan was not providing enough cooling to the chip, and it was shutting down as it reached critical temperature, since I’ve had no freezes since.. so if in doubt and your mac is freezing.. give the innards a good hoover!!

Andy Piper also let me know the commenting on the blog was broken (thanks for that, and the congrats on the engagement!) It seems that I missed something in my auto changing comments scripts, something that I have to do to battle the constant spam I get here; basically every few days the comments.cgi script changes to something random and the site should rebuild to take advantage of the new script. Somehow it wasn’t rebuilding all the pages correctly, and hence it was giving and error when people wanted to comment; This is now fixed.. and if your not leaving spam.. comment away.. I also do need to redesign the entire blog, so I’ll need to code in that fix when I update the backend installation of MovableType.

Since I was now on a fixing and tidying mission, I attacked the office at home.. The office really is the place I spend most of my day, its my home office for IBM, and also it’s where lot of my less valuable magic books sit, my G5 Mac, my Thinkpad (obviously!) and all my technical books, and its where Ash and Willow spend most of the day when I’m at home, and to be honest.. it’s a mess..

It’s looking a lot more tidier now, and I think if I keep tidying during my lunch breaks and evenings, it might be inhabitable by the end of the week again!!!

Technorati Tags: Apple, freezes, Mac, OSX

Last night we headed out to Stonehenge to have an after hours tour of the stones, and watch the sunset. Normally Stonehenge is only open for a set amount of time per day, and always closes after sunrise and before sunset.

You also can’t get any nearer to the stones than the rope that surrounds the perimeter of the circle, which is ok, but it limits your views, and certainly stops you appreciating the views out of the circle down the avenue, and just generally the amazing aspects of the stones and the circle itself.

We were lucky to have managed to get on a private tour after hours, that also coincided with the sunset. Armed with my camera a few compact flash cards and multiple batteries we headed off.

The tour itself was great, we had our own guide, who knew a lot about the surrounding area and the history of the stones and site, as an archaeologist he was able to really give details on the area, the history and the stones themselves.

At about 8:45 we headed under the road through to the circle itself, and although we should have only had about an hour, we left the circle much later on. The most amazing part of this was being able to walk straight over the ropes into the circle itself, and have pretty much free rein on walking amongst the enormous standing stones.

Whilst we were in the main circle itself, our guide talked about how the stones were erected and how they related to other monuments in the area, and aspects of the landscape (both man made and natural) around the area.

Stonehenge at anytime of the day is eerie, but even more so at sunset, even with the road noise, Stonehenge is quiet and peaceful, and with only about 15 of us in the circle it was even more so.

We played with some divining rods around the circle, trying to find the lay lines that run through the monument, although with my magical background anything can be made to move in a particular direction, Michelle had a little more luck though.

I’m very pleased with the way the photos came out, and I’m very impressed with the ones I took as silhouettes. I would have liked to have taken a tripod, or even a monopod, but I think they are not allowed within the circle itself for obvious reasons..

Technorati Tags: photography, stonehenge, stone circles, sunsets